Saturday, February 27, 1982

Pseud

Dad got me up and we set out early to pick up my cousin Jenny and go frog-spawning. We were soon tramping down the ancient pack-horse lane through trees towards the canal and Dengates marsh. It stretches between river and canal for a quarter of a mile or so, but it seems less full this year, as if it's gradually draining away. Big trees are springing up in the middle of what was once a deep wide watery marsh.

We traversed the full length with no luck, passing the gypsy camp across the river: an air of squalor, the paper, wood and prepackaged filth of today strewn down the sloping riverbank into the grey water. On the way home we dropped in on Nanna B.

After dinner I had to sit through Dad and Mum’s negative comments about today’s youth and people with weird hair or clothing. “They want rounding up.”

I felt like such a pseud.

At 2.30 me and Dad drove down to Farnshaw, dropping in on Great Uncle Arthur (Watkin), who's a sprightly 82 and in such good shape I was amazed. He could be 62! Dad’s cousin was there and both she and G.U.A. expressed surprise at my resemblance to the young Great Uncle Sidney. . . . I felt a kind of pride at this link with the past, that I'm carrying all that heritage forward. He talks so much, but we managed to get away and Dad bought me a book illustrating the “American Experience” with short stories by Melville, Hawthorne, Saroyan etc.

Andrew's impressed by Rip Rig & Panic; he went to Jim’s in Whincliffe during the afternoon and evening.

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ABOUT MERE PSEUD . . .

"It's about time you started thinking about the black dog on your back."

Mere Pseud emerges from the stain of a particular place at a particular time—England in the early 1980s, dreaming its way through the era of the Miner’s Strike, CND, Rock Against Racism, of Thatcher, the Falkland’s War and mass unemployment, an era that marks a turning point for British society, the advent of what we might call neoliberalism.

This four year long autofiction project mixes diary entries, cultural observation, teen confessionals, an enduring love for UK postpunk band The Fall, image-meditations on memory, and spoken word fragments; it’s a reckoning with the passages of time and the spectral intermingling of futures and pasts, a slantways slide through places, spaces, and states of mind.

This is the moveable backdrop; part social history, part prolonged personal pratfall, the spectral trace of a world that's already curiously antique.

"The journal has such familiar episodes . . . being a certain age at a certain time in history, the political atmosphere, cultural touchstones, living situations . . . desires to both escape and belong ending in nihilistic abyss of fuckitall."

PRINCIPAL DRAMATIS PERSONAE, SUMMER 1983

The Mere Pseud . . . The unreliable eighteen-year old modernist narrator of this fable. Now a student at Watermouth University. Perhaps he'll run into Howard Kirk?Barry, Stu, Pete, Penny, Gareth, Shelley, Lindsey. University friends.

Rowan Morrison. Dark-eyed changeling who lived a few doors down from the Mere Pseud his first year at Wollstonecraft. A little older and a little weirder than all the rest. Her dark sun sends a chill through the second floor corridors of Wollstonecraft.

Helen Vaughan . . . (1864-1919). Enigmatic Yorkshire novelist, author of The Harp of the Sky (1920), and inspiration for British horror writer Arthur Machen's character of the same name in his story "The Great God Pan." Occasional object of the Mere Pseud's obsessive thoughts about death, time, and the passing of all things.

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